Theophilus North (22 page)

Almost at once I made a small discovery. It was a schoolgirl's “memory book,” bound in coral velvet, moth-eaten, mouldy. There were faded blue photographs of picnics and birthday parties, dance cards and autographs. On one page H. W. Longfellow had copied out “The Children's Hour,” “for my dear young friend Faith Somerville.” With a show of casual interest I bought the book for two dollars; the following autumn I sold it in New York for thirty. I found bundles of Somerville papers and bought them for forty cents a pound. My idea was that somehow I might penetrate that magic world (my father used to call it “plain living and high thinking”) and glimpse those enchanted late afternoons in Newport when professors played croquet with their children until fireflies hovered over the wickets and a voice called, “Come in, children, and wash your hands before supper.”

I knew that any first edition of a work by Edgar Allan Poe was among the greatest prizes in all American book-collecting and that any letter from his pen was eagerly sought. Poe had paid an extensive visit to Providence, only thirty miles away; but there was no record of his having visited Newport. If I could discover a bundle of Poe's letters—what a lively interest for me and, later, what an addition to my capital savings! (No biographer had yet drawn up the wide spectrum of
that
boyhood's ambitions: poet, detective, gentleman, actor perhaps [like his mother], metaphysician [“Eureka!”], cryptographer, landscape gardener, interior decorator, tormented lover—too great and diverse a load for any American to carry. )

I found no Poe letters, but his name was brought to my attention repeatedly. One evening I found under my door a copy of his poem “Ulalume,” signed by the poet and a triumph of Elbert Hughes's art. Meeting Hughes by chance in the hall I thanked him; but I tore the counterfeit up.

There was no night watchman prowling the corridors of the “Y,” but a night clerk, Maury Flynn, tended the front desk. Maury was a cheerless old man in poor health. Like many night attendants in hotels and clubs he was a retired policeman. One night toward three in the morning I was awakened by a knock at my door. It was Maury.

“Ted, are you a partickler friend of Hughes in 32?”

“I know him, Maury. What's the matter?”

“Fellow in the next room says he's been having nightmares. Groaning like. Falling out of bed. This fellow telephoned me. Would you go in and see if you could calm him down, sort of?”

I threw on a bathrobe and got into some slippers and went down to Room 32. Maury had left the door ajar and the light on. Elbert was sitting on the edge of his bed, his head bent over his knees.

“Elbert! Elbert! What's the matter?”

He raised his head, gazed at me vacantly, and resumed his former position. I shook him brusquely but he made no response. I looked about the room. On the center table lay an unfinished example of his accomplished art. It was the opening of “The Fall of the House of Usher.” On the bedside table stood a half-empty bottle of “Dr. Quimby's Sleeping Syrup.” I sat down and watched him for a while, repeating his name in a low insistent voice. Then I went to the washstand, dipped a washrag in cold water, and applied it to his face, the nape of his neck, and to his wrists—as I used to do to drunken companions in Paris in 1921. I now did this several times.

At last he raised his head again and mumbled, “Hello, Ted. Nothing . . . Bad dreams.”

“Get up, Elbert. I'm going to walk you up and down the corridor a few times. Breathe, breathe deep.”

He fell back on the bed and shut his eyes. More cold water. I slapped his face and struck his shoulder sharply. At last we were walking the corridor. We must have done a quarter of a mile. We returned to the room. “No! You remain standing. Take some more deep breaths. . . . Tell me about your dreams. . . . Yes, you can hold on to the wall.”

“Buried alive. Can't get out. Nobody can hear me.”

“Do you take this syrup all the time?”

“Don't sleep very good. Don't want to sleep because . . .
they
come. But I've got to sleep, because when I don't, I make mistakes in my work. They take it off my pay.”

“Do you know Dr. Addison?”

“No.”

“Why don't you? He's the ‘Y's' doctor. He's in and out of the building all the time. I'm going to send him to see you tomorrow night. Talk to him; tell him everything. And don't drink any more of this stuff. Will you give me permission to take this bottle away? . . . And, Elbert, don't read any more Edgar Allan. Poe. He's not right for you—all those crypts and vaults. Do you think you'll be able to sleep calmly now? . . . Do you want me to read aloud to you for ten minutes?”

“Yes, will you, Ted?”

“I'm going to read to you in a language you don't understand. All you have to know is that it's serene and beautiful like the printing of the Elzevirs.”

So I read him from Ariosto and he went off like a baby.

I lost touch with Elbert for about ten days. Dr. Addison gave him some sleeping pills and some stern advice about his diet; he had been scarcely eating at all. I continued my search for the Fifth City. In another store—now down almost at the rags-bottles-and-sacks level—I had another stroke of luck: the rejected sketches of the elder Henry James's commentary on a work of Swedenborg. They were resting in a barrel together with bundles of old letters to the family. I separated the letters from the theology and bought them for very little. I had first become interested in the writing Jameses while reading ( in my earliest phase ), with mounting dissatisfaction, William James's
Varieties of Religious Experience;
more recently I had read a number of his brother's novels. The James family lived in Newport throughout the Civil War. The two eldest sons had left to join the Army. William, Henry, and their sister Alice all had had nervous breakdowns in 1860 and enlistment of those brothers was out of the question. The letters had little to tell me, but I felt I was on the trail.

Within two weeks my teaching schedule became so heavy that I had to give up those researches entirely. What little free time I had was devoted to hunting for an apartment. This was limited to opportunities within my means—among the jerry-built workmen's homes on the streets leading up the slope from the further reach of Thames Street. I rang every doorbell whether there was an advertisement of lodging or not. I had a clear idea of what I wanted: two rooms or one large room, a bath, a cooking facility however simple. I wanted the rooms to be on the second story, entered by an outside stairway so that (yet not the only reason) I would not be required to come and go through the landlord's residence and family. I did not object to crying babies, boisterous children, a location above a kitchen, a sloping roof, proximity to a firehouse or to a convivial fraternal organization or to church bells. This requirement of a separate entrance was not as uncommon as might appear. These old houses were beginning to be subdivided into family apartments; elderly lodgers were increasingly afraid of fires, frequent enough in this run-down area. I was shown many apartments and derived considerable enjoyment from the encounters this search involved.

One morning I found my apartment. I had surveyed the premises and seen the exterior stairway. The mailbox said “Keefe.” The door was opened by a thin distrustful woman in her middle fifties. Her face was lined but retained the high coloring characteristic of those living by a northern sea. I learned later that on the death of her husband over twenty years ago she had opened a rooming house and raised two sturdy sons to become merchant seamen. In spite of many disappointments she had never been able to free herself of the idea that a rooming house should have the character of a home. She was distrustful but eager to trust.

“Good morning, Mrs. Keefe. Have you an apartment to let?”

She paused a moment. “I have and I haven't. How long would you want it?”

“All summer, ma'am, if it suited me.”

“Are you alone? . . . What is your work?”

“I'm a tennis instructor at the Casino. My name is Theodore North.”

“Do you attend any church regularly?”

“I've only been a short time in Newport. During the War I was stationed at Fort Adams. I used to walk into town to attend the evening service at Emmanuel Church.”

“Come in and sit down. Excuse my dress; it's early and I'm housecleaning.”

She led me into a sitting room that should have been preserved in a museum for generations yet unborn.

“What exactly were you looking for, Mr. North?”

“One large room or two small ones; a bath and some simple kitchen facility; some housecleaning and a change of linen once a week. And I'd like it to be on the second floor with an exterior stairway.”

She had been looking me up and down. “How much would you be willing to pay, Mr. North?”

“I was thinking of twenty-five dollars a month, ma'am.”

She sighed and examined the floor in silence. I remained silent too. With each of us every penny counted; but she had a weightier anxiety on her mind. “It is occupied at present, but I have told the men there that they must be prepared to give it up on two weeks' notice. They agreed to that.”

“You don't find them satisfactory, Mrs. Keefe?”

“I don't know what to think. They don't sleep there. They had me take the beds away. They used it like it was a business office. They brought in a big table to work on. They say they're architects, working on some problem, some prize-contest they want to win. Like a plan for a perfect town, something like that.”

“Do they give you any trouble?”

“I don't see them or hear them for a week at a time, except sometimes when they come and go up their back stairs. I never see any of them face to face except when he pays the rent. They keep the doors locked all day and night. They do their own cleaning up. Never any letters; never any telephone calls. Mr. North, they're like ghosts in the house. Never say good morning; never exchange the time of day. I don't call that
roomers.”

She was looking at me with a first sign of confidence, even of appeal.

“Did they give any kind of reference in town when they came? Any other address?”

“The oldest one, I guess he's the head of 'em, gave me the number of his postbox at the Post Office—Number 308. One Sunday noon I saw them all eating at the Thames Street Blue Star Restaurant.”

“Have you taken other people up to inspect the apartment?”

“Yes, two married couples. They didn't like it—no beds, hardly any chairs. I guess it didn't look like an apartment to them. Besides, there's the smell.”

“Smell!”

“Yes, it's getting all through the house. Some chemical they use.”

“Mrs. Keefe, I think you have reason to be worried.”

“How do you mean?”

“I don't know yet. Can you take me up there now?”

“Yes . . . Yes, I'd
like
to.”

That amazing detective Chief Inspector Theophilus North had sprung to life again. I followed her up the stairs and when she had knocked loudly at the door I gestured to her, smiling, to stand at one side. I put my ear to the crack in the door. I heard a muffled oath, whispered commands, rapid motions, a falling object. Finally the door was unlocked and a tall man with a southern colonel's mustache and goatee, very angry, faced us. He was wearing a white linen coat that I associate with surgeons.

“I'm sorry to disturb you, Mr. Forsythe, but there's a gentleman here who'd like to look at the apartment.”

“I asked you to arrange these interruptions at the noon hour, Mrs. Keefe.”

“My visitors have to make these calls at their own time. They visit five and six apartments every morning. I'm sorry; that's the way it is.”

It was a large room filled with the sunlight that I would seldom be able to enjoy—seeming all the larger because of the sparseness of the furniture. A long trestle-like table ran the length of the room. On one end of it rested what I think would be called a “mock-up” of an ideal village in miniature, a delightful piece of work. The four men stood against the wall as though they were undergoing a military inspection.

To my great surprise the youngest of the men was Elbert Hughes. He was as astonished as I was, and extremely frightened. In my role as detective I knew that it was my task to appear as unsuspicious as possible. I strolled over to Elbert and shook his hand. “Good morning, Hughes. Too bad to be indoors on a fine morning like this. We'll get you out on the tennis courts yet.” I gave him a blow on the shoulder. “You look kind of thin and peaked to me, Hughes.
Tennis
, man, that's what you need!—What! Making children's toys? Awfully pretty village that. Excuse me, gentlemen, while I see if there'd be room in these cupboards for my collection of tennis cups.” There was a row of china cupboards, faced with glass and lined with silk. I grasped at their handles, but they were locked. “Locked?—Well, don't take the trouble to unlock them now.” I strolled into the bathroom and kitchen. “Just right for me,” I said to Mrs. Keefe. “Funny smell, though. I also have a collection of rocks—an old hobby of mine, semiprecious stones. I'd like a good deal of cupboard space for them, too.” Returning into the main room I looked about me genially. It appeared as unlike an architect's
atelier
as possible.
There were no waste paper baskets!
It was as neat and uncluttered as a business office in a department store window—except for one thing: across the open windows were strung sheets of paper, delicately fastened together; they were damp and had been hung out to dry. They had been dyed the color of blond tobacco.

I smiled to Mr. Forsythe and said, “Laundry day, eh?”

“Mrs. Keefe,” he said, “I think the gentleman has had time enough to inspect the apartment. We must get back to our work.”

I assumed that the making of counterfeit money and the engravers' and etchers' art would require a bulky press and pots of blue and green ink, but nothing of the kind was to be seen. The sheets of paper in the window were certainly being “aged.” But I was getting “hot.”